


A Liar, But Not a Fraud

by LunaCatriona



Series: Black Water (Alternative POVs) [2]
Category: The Thick of It (TV)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-09
Updated: 2020-08-09
Packaged: 2021-03-05 22:07:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,744
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25812568
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LunaCatriona/pseuds/LunaCatriona
Summary: "He was a liar but not a fraud; living proof that there was no God; just the Devil, stiff as a rod; a slave to a sugartooth." ('Sugartooth', Brandi Carlile)Part of Chapter 15 of 'Eye of the Storm' from Victoria's point of view.Victoria has seen many things in her time, and they all add up to the version of Malcolm Tucker who now lies in her spare room.
Series: Black Water (Alternative POVs) [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1848652
Comments: 11
Kudos: 7





	A Liar, But Not a Fraud

**Author's Note:**

> You will probably now notice that these won't be in any order. Sorry about that.

Victoria felt guilty.

She felt like the worst woman in the world for standing here, watching as her son-in-law broke into cold sweats and talked in his sleep. But when the boy refused to open up, how else was she supposed to find out what he was thinking?

She had heard him singing. That same song they sang at Katie’s funeral. She almost woke him there and then, but decided to let it play out and look for any clue as to what was going on in his head.

“Because of me?” asked Malcolm, though of whom Victoria could have no inkling. She stepped into the room, turned the light on, and gently sat down on the corner of the bed. So far into sleep was he that he did not feel her weight move his, nor did the light wake him.

He twisted, like he was looking around himself, but his eyes were closed. It got faster, and then…he stopped dead. Victoria had seen a face haunted like this before. Her daughter, sitting at that dining table, staring ahead while Victoria read her suicide note. While they listened to the trauma she could not tell her own mother of.

And this man, he was the same. Trauma carved lines into his face as he dreamed. “…didn’t _know_!” he shouted.

He thrashed and twitched. He writhed like he was in physical agony, though Victoria knew the agony was mental. It had to end. She had to stop it in its tracks. To put him through any more of this was inhumane, even if the end goal was to help him. “Malcolm!” she called out to him. Nothing. He did not respond, and he continued his struggling.

“Malcolm!” she bellowed. This time, as he flailed out, she seized him by the wrists.

He woke. His eyes gleamed blue in the light above. Their brightness betrayed his fright, his panic, as he fought against her with this whole body. She fought back; her years of restraining emergency patients worked in her favour here. “Malcolm, calm down!” When he did not, Victoria tightened her grip on his wrists and shook them slightly. “Malcolm!”

The light showed up the sweat on his brow. Trauma. Inherited trauma traced through the blue specks in his eyes like spectres between gravestones.

“Malcolm,” she said to him. Keep saying his name. She had to have a way of tethering him to her. “You’re alright. You’re safe.”

“Nicola,” he blurted out.

Victoria held him by the forearm. “She’s alright. She’s at home with the children,” Victoria told him urgently. He stopped struggling, but it seemed it was forced. He was fighting himself now, not her. “Everyone is alright.”

Malcolm’s face screwed tight, like he internally wailed. What had he seen? She had never taken him for the type to be so upset by dreams. Reality, yes, but not what the mind churned up in sleep. His fear frightened her; she pulled him in and held him close. He buried his head into her shoulder, his fingers tied around handfuls of her nightshirt. “It wasn’t real. Whatever it was, whatever did this to you, it wasn’t real,” she promised him gently. “Your wife and kids are safe, Malcolm.”

He didn’t calm down. Victoria felt his muscles tense into knots beneath her hands.

The boy was about to break. Man, not boy. But here, in her arms, he seemed so helpless. A lost boy, living in anger and despair because he didn’t know what else there could be. There were times she thought he looked for anger like an addict looked for heroin. Anger was the high, despair was the comedown. However anger affected him, Victoria knew it had to be better than the crash of despair waiting for him when it dissipated.

She had married an alcoholic, after all. Different substance, same behaviour. Looking for something, anything, to save himself from the lowest of the low points.

Addicted to anger. That’s what this man was. By the sounds of things, he had been since he was just a boy. And where had he learned that? From a traumatised man, whose life eventually ended by his own hand.

She should have realised that on New Year’s Eve. When there was no more anger, or when perhaps even anger was too painful to express, he had turned it all on himself. Maybe the comedown had finally caught him that night.

The man was a liar. He lied when he raged. His anger was not pure. It was covering a toxic pool of fear, and grief, and self-doubt, and a thousand other things he was scared of feeling. Now he was feeling them all at once, and it must have been so much worse than dealing with them as they appeared.

“Are you okay?” she asked of him.

That was all it took. One question. His whole body trembled. This was his true loss of control. All that shouting and roaring and intimidation, that was his way of keeping control. It had to be. He might not even had known he was doing it, but he chose anger. He chose it over this.

It put that whole incident in Bella’s kitchen that Nicola had described in a new light. He had relinquished control of one thing to keep his handle on something much harder to bear.

“What is it, kid?” she asked. “What did you see?”

“Everyone was dead,” he mumbled against her shoulder. His voice shook. “And he wasn’t.”

“Who wasn’t?”

“Dad.”

“He wasn’t dead, you mean?”

Malcolm shook his head. Victoria helped him sit up so that she could better see his face. He was pale and looked terrified and exhausted. “He wasn’t fucking dead.” He hesitated before he spoke again, perhaps wondering if she would think him mad. “Well, he was. It was his funeral. Hole in his head, wrung at the neck. But he…he could speak.”

“What did he say?”

Malcolm did not answer that. “The church collapsed in on us. Killed everyone. Everyone but _him_. And he was fucking dead in the first place.”

“Collapsed,” Victoria said slowly, realisation dawning upon her. “Like a bomb was dropped on it.”

“Yeah.” She reached out a hand and took his in it. He looked down, as if trying to work out why she did that. “Like we were bombed.” His head snapped up. “You weren’t there.”

“Why should I be at your father’s funeral?”

“Nicola was. The kids were.” He stared at her for a moment. “Maybe it was because you’re the one who knows I’m a fucking lost cause.”

“I don’t fight for lost causes, Malcolm. You should know that by now, or else you don’t fucking know me.” It puzzled him. She could tell from his frown that he really did not understand that he was not a lost cause at all. “What did your father say to you?”

He turned his head away. “He said they were dead because of me.”

Victoria kept silent. Why would he think that? Most of Nicola’s trauma had been caused by James fucking Murray. In comparison, he had not put Nicola through very much; there was a difference between a flawed human being trying to make his way in the world and a man who used and abused everything and everyone for his own personal satisfaction.

Was his mind trying to take the blame for atrocities committed by another? Or was he scared his own failings – very human failings – would bring about the end of his world? This world, the one that had judged him at sixteen and never let him be anything but raging Malcolm Tucker. What was he supposed to do with that?

“He’s right about me,” Malcolm said suddenly. “I’m fucked up. I ruin everything I touch.” He pulled his hand away from Victoria’s. “I’m a shit husband, a shit son, a shit brother, a shit dad to kids who never wanted me to begin with. I do my best but I’m just fucking _shit_.”

There it was. Under all the rage and bluster was a man who never learned to accept himself. He spent so long reaching back for time that could not be recovered that he missed the truth of his own value. “You’re not,” Victoria said quietly. “You saved Nicola’s life. You swam out to save her after being shot in the leg – which was fucking stupid and could have got you killed, by the way, but I’m grateful nonetheless. You took my grandchildren on as your own when they were left without a father. You chose to be part of Bella’s life, even though you never fucking knew about her. Your choices, Malcolm, they aren’t choices a bad person makes. A reckless person, maybe, but not a bad one. You are _not_ shit.”

“But shouting at Nicola and hurting Verity-”

“Think about it. Think about why you made those mistakes.” His brow furrowed at her once again. “You’re quick to anger because you know it’s easier than what waits for you on the other end of that fucked up scale. I think that’s the only way you know how to control what you feel. And those _were_ bad choices, but they don’t make you a bad man.”

Why that broke through the final wall, Victoria never was certain. Malcolm hunched over and hid his face in his hands, and she was sure she heard him cry. It was all she could do for him in that moment to shuffle closer and put her arms around him. Whatever his mistakes, whatever his flaws, he was not a man who deserved to feel like this. He definitely did cry; she could feel it in the way he raggedly drew breath and muffled his own sobs.

Years, decades, of turmoil led to his habits. Months of continued stress and trauma brought him to this point at which he completely broke. “Don’t tell Nicola,” he murmured through his tears.

And there he was again, trying to protect his wife from despair, showing her rage instead. “I won’t,” said Victoria. “Not about this.”

She meant it. As Victoria held her son-in-law tight, she vowed to herself that while she may tell Nicola of the reasons for his behaviour and how he had dreamed of his family dead under a collapsed church, she would never let her know how deep these wounds were. Some things, she knew, could never leave this room.


End file.
